BORG
Create efficient backups
Backups aren’t just a safety net for Trekkies such as Shashank Sharma, but a way of life. But they can take up quite a lot of space if not done right…
OUR EXPERT
Shashank Sharma is a trial lawyer in Delhi and an avid Arch user. He’s always on the hunt for pocketfriendly geeky memorabilia.
M ost backup strategies lead to a lot of wasted space because you invariably end up making copies of the same data over and over again. In essence, data deduplication is the process of comparing chunks of data, and retaining only a single unique copy, thereby saving disk space. When deployed as a data backup strategy, this means that only changes since the last backup are stored.
Backup tools for Linux are as prolific as browsers, video players or even text editors, BorgBackup, or just Borg, is a deduplicating backup utility. Released under the BSD license, the project was forked from Attic, a popular backup utility, in 2015. Thanks to the data deduplication technique, Borg is suitable as an everyday home or even enterprise backup solution, with a host of features that make it a breeze to use.
Since Borg is only interested in changes since your last backup, the entire process is fast and efficient. Even better, Borg also supports compression, which further limits the amount of disk space eaten by backups.
Finally, Borg also supports client-side encryption, so you can safely encrypt backups before they are transmitted to remote storage locations. Apart from all that, Borg backups can be mounted as a filesystem. This means that you can use a file manager to examine the contents of the backup, and restore only specific files.